At a recent VMUG UserCon, I got to talking to Madison Soave there about how very popular my articles about EVALExperence have been, with more than 20,000 readers so far! A great offering for a large chunk of my visitors, those home virtualization lab enthusiasts, making sure to thank her. I'm surprised how often folks still haven't heard of this program. Not having to worry about 60 day time bombs, and being able to re-up your membership to simply get new keys to apply to your existing lab, means rebuilds from scratch are no longer a part of the home lab experience.

But I also mentioned to her that the vSphere code was still the initial 6.5 release from last November, and that last I checked, the vSAN license key was Hybrid only, for a back-level version. Even though updating VCSA and ESXi have gotten easier, there can still be troubles for some upgraders who may very well be new to vSphere, the folks you least want to scare away. Wouldn't it be best if the latest code was available instead? Shouldn't the new user be spared the need to do more downloads for upgrades or critical patches right after installing?

paired with the very latest VMware NSX 6.3.1VMware-NSX-Manager-6.3.1-5124716.ova

make this combo a rather powerful statement about how serious VMware is about getting their enterprise code into the hands of dedicated IT Professionals. These are enterprise products, most easily tested in a home lab with lots of RAM. They're also both strategic products for VMware right now, enjoying rapid innovation. For vSAN, be sure you use gear that's on the VCG (vSAN Compatibility Guide), or go with a much more practical nested configuration.

My previous employer didn't reimbursed for vSphere code or for home lab equipment for years, which is typical these days. I happily bought my subscription to EVALExperience anyway. I found it to be invaluable in my home lab, where I constantly tinker with hardware and software, using both vSphere 6.5 and VMware Workstation. Even though VMware offers an incredible array of Hands-On Labs for free at any time remotely and in person, that I get to enjoy presenting at , there are projects that I enjoy that absolutely require my own compact datacenter, and I know many of you feel the same about whatever gear you have in your home lab.

Even though I joined VMware this past January as a vSAN Systems Engineer, I still invested in EVALExperience! I want to be able to stay on top of exactly what code is in there at any time, to give best effort help to readers who frequently leave comments and questions below my articles. If you have specific questions about signing up, or the downloads or license keys, please contact info@vmug.com directly. Here's some Q&A I've pulled together, based on questions TinkerTry visitors and I had, with VMUG Advantage's responses below each:

I noticed the Kivuto download for vSAN 6.6 is correct, but what I’m wondering is about is the license key, do you know it’s for vSAN 6.6 for sure?
The reason I ask is that would mean it’s now All Flash vSAN capable, since all vSAN editions include that now (it used to be hybrid only for EVAL Experience)

The keys available are for vSAN 6.6

Do you know how many ESXi hosts (servers), and how many CPU sockets in each, can be run with the licenses in EVAL Experience? (it used to be 3, see also screenshot below).

Correct, it is 3! (servers)
They can have 6 sockets (total) so 3 dual (sockets).Clarification by Zach Widing - VMware vSphere/vSAN/NSX licensing only cares about sockets…. So if its 3 hosts with dual sockets, the license should be 6 CPUs ;-p

This code download is fast and seemingly not rate-limited like most CDNs. Courtesy of the CacheFly CDN that you'll see featured in this video below, I got sustained download speeds upwards of 300Mbps, which is actually the full rated speed of my home lab's internet connection! See also my VCSA-friendly Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite that's ready for a million packets per second, works great with vSphere 6.5, and costs under $100 USD!

2) Once you've made your purchase, visit

vmugadvantage.onthehub.com
to get your software and license keys. If you think you'll be using all the offered code soon, it's a bit more straight forward to go ahead and add EVERYTHING to your shopping cart, then click the buy for $0 button, so you can kick off all those downloads.

There's dozens of files in that VMUG Advantage EVALExperience WebStore awaiting, and they come from CacheFly CDN, in my case at an astounding 300Mbps.

While those downloads are going, you can request all the license keys. This way, you can build up a single document that contains all those precious license keys, all in one place, to save somewhere safely.

vSphere Enterprise

I checked in with Madison this week, and she confirmed that the version of vSAN in EVALExperience is indeed the Enterprise version, which allows Dedupe and Compression and Data-at-Rest Encryption, without the need for pricier SED drives! I'll need to test this to test/verify all this, but wow, this is going to be huge! See comparison table here.

$20 off!

The other big news here is that the discount codeTINKERTRY
will work throughout 2017, as a way to knock $20 off your EVALExperience purchase! Just remember to use it when placing your order, before you finish checking out. That's right, just $180 now, even if you can't make it to your local VMUG!

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